forum: Food & Drink

Jamie at Home

On the episode aired last Friday, Jamie marianated chicken with a leg of lamb????. Aren't we sopposed to keep raw chicken away from other meats. How come he did this, and to cap it off he tasted the marinade the raw chicken had been in!!! Eek does this man have a death wish or what. Comments please

Re: Jamie at Home

Gill - this is marinading - the final prep before cooking. We aren't talkng about long-term storage, where it is a good idea to separate meats (especially raw from cooked) to prevent cross contamination.

Raw Chicken is not some sort of toxic waste! - you are going to eat it after all! It isn't unusual to combined different meats together, or to marinade them together - if using the same marinade for all the different meats, it makes no sense to marinade them separately, since they are to be combined anyway.

I've no idea what was in the marinade in this instance, but many marinades have strong anti-microbial properties - especially those which tenderise meat. I would hazard a guess that Jamie probably knows what he is doing :-)

As an aside, I think sometimes people get too worried about hygiene in the home kitchen - on of my grandmothers favourite sayings was "Tha's bahn ta eat a peck o' muck afore tha dees" - which roughly translates as "Eating some dirt is inevitable". (She is, of course, now dead - family legend has it that it was spontaneous combustion at the age of 98!). I have a feeling (which is backed by some scientific evidence) that the apparent rise in food allergies, asthma and eczema in children etc. is a result of a weakened immune system caused by lack of exposure to small amounts of a wide variety of "pathogens".

Re: Jamie at Home

Thanks for your reply. Your chicken in UK must be cleaner than ours in NZ. We have record food poisoning supposedly due to chicken contamination in this country. It would be nice if chicken was a "clean" food but here its not.

Re: Jamie at Home

Chicken flesh contains various bacteria with in it. This is why it is unsafe to eat it raw or rare. That is also why it is unsafe to have raw chicken (or surfaces it has touched) in contact with foods that are ready to eat (like already cooked meats or salads). If you are planning to cook everything that you are marinating with the chicken then it would be ok. From memory (when that episode was shown recently in australia). Jamie cooks all the meats in the oven then finishes them on the bbq, more than well cooked to get rid of the bacteria. He also cooked the marinade on the bbq before putting it on the cooked meats.

Re: Jamie at Home

I might add, Gill, that that is chicken flesh everywhere. Some chickens have more bacteria in their flesh than others but the differences are not significant and are not by breed or area. Organic chickens, who are not given antibiotics (to stop tummy upsets), tend to have slightly more bacteria in their flesh. By the way (this is favourite rant of mine), in Australia, chickens are not fed hormones and have not been for 40 years. I imagine the same is true in new zealand. Of course the advertising by the chicken suppliers puts organic chicken as "chemical free, hormone free" and doesn't mention that all chicken in australia is hormone free (apart from the natural hormones that the chickens create in their own little bodies).

Re: Jamie at Home

I've had food poisoning once. At a friend's party from pork meat balls that were kept in the front of the fridge before they were cooked. This fridge was being opened constantly for drinks. I ended up sleeping in the bath after that meal and everything else I'd consumed exited my body in dramatic fashion.

Re: Jamie at Home

Actually Rabbit, about the whole hormone thing... dont be too sure. I have a friend whos a chicken catcher for Ingham chicken, and he has stressed to me never to buy their products due to their chickens being pumped so heavily. From his mouth: "They're so pumped with crap that by the time I've gotta get 'em, most of em die at my feet from heart attack. And if that doesn't happen, then they're too huge to be able to walk properly." -- Doesn't sound natural to me.

Re: Jamie at Home

This is a very debatable subject. I too have family members who were chicken farmers / growers for Ingham. Prior to buying the farm, they did a lot of research into this claim and found that hormones are not fed to Australian chickens.

They would received the chicks at a day or 2 old. They are held in sheds with heating at round 30-32c (from memory), fed constantly and are in light almost always until a couple of weeks old. Then the lights are off for longer and longer as this then lets the chickens rest and allow them to grow. At 6 weeks old they have grown to the size Ingham wants them to be and are collected again.

It is the controlled environment that enhances their growth and this is probably the reason or part of too, why people choose to buy free range organic chickens.

Re: Jamie at Home

i havent actually seen it with my own eyes, so perhaps hes blowin sunshine up my ass, but i wouldnt be surprised if it turned out to be true, to be honest.

Also, most chickens are fed constantly. I mean, you cant really force feed them, but most chickens have food available to them whenever they want. The light thing is the only difference there (which, i guess you could argue) is a big difference because then they dont stop eating. Also, when my girlfriend and i went to buy her chickens, we were told by the farmer there that many of these places keep light on them constantly, not just while they're young. This way they dont really go to sleep and just keep constantly eating until they're slaughtered. Obviously, this would make huge chickens.

Its funny to see the different varieties of chickens around. If you look at the chickens in the supermarkets, they are all usually the size of an average Isa Brown (I guess people would be put off if they were too big). However, the English breed that my girlfriend has is roughly the size of a turkey. Somehow i doubt that a company whos produce is not seen whole by the consumer would worry about this aspect, but its an interesting thought.

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